The Man in the Woods
BY EDDY KOSIK
The man in the woods wants me to join him. He’s not there yet, the woods. But he says we could meet there. That he knows a spot. That he’s brought boys there before. Young men scrolling Grindr as they visit the town Jim Thorpe for the day. Who left their hometowns in northeast Pennsylvania for cities— Philadelphia, New York, Baltimore — because it was impossible to imagine life in the Pocono Mountains. He calls me boy though tomorrow I am twenty-one. I guess I am fine with that. I guess I have no intention of becoming a man. Though I have no idea what else I would become. After all, I must be growing into something.
The man in the woods can’t host at his place. And even though I don’t suggest it, he says the bathrooms of the local restaurants, the corner gas station, would be too risky. If we got caught, he means. (He laughs after every other sentence. That is, he types haha.) The woods, however, are quiet, vast. These anthracite hills I grew up in. My great grandfather, he was a coal miner. His father, too, even before he came to the states, blind in one eye, from what his immigration papers just called Slovakland. Their Pennsylvania was a place of woods and tunnels. People disappeared all the time back then.
The man in the woods knows a spot. Just a few minutes off a walking trail, not far from the train tracks. Maybe ten, fifteen minutes off the trail at most.
I’m here with someone, I tell him. Let me see if I can lose him. I wonder if I know the man. If he knows me. He doesn’t have a photo on his profile, just his height and weight, but he might recognize me. I grew up twenty minutes from here. I’ve been the secret of men around here before: a childhood friend’s older brother, the driver’s ed instructor. I imagine the thrill of meeting this man, kneeling on cold stone, the hiss of his breath as I take him into my mouth. The man knows these woods, he assures me. He grew up around here, just like me. In fact, he first went to this spot when he was around my age. And it’s not often he gets a chance to meet boys now. When he gets the chance, he goes for it. So this is him going for it. Haha.
“Who are you texting?” R asks. We’ve just arrived from Philadelphia, parked in front of a house with a browning jack-o’lantern on its porch. Across the street is a church. The white sign out front, with removable black letters: Chrch. It’s not the same without u. The church has its own parking lot, but all throughout the parking lot are signs warning of towing, so no one has parked there– not even the tourists.
“My parents,” I say, closing the exchange with the man in the woods.
R tugs the parking brake in place before offering his big hand. “Show me,” he says.
“Stop,” I say. I shove the passenger door open. “They’re just wondering what time we will be there for dinner.”
“Obi!” He exits the driver’s side. “Let me see your phone.” He trips on the curb before joining me on the sidewalk. “We made a deal that it would just be me and you this weekend.”
“I’m just telling them we’ll be there in a few hours.” I’ve already pulled a text up from my mother: Your father and I can’t wait to see YOU! And to meet your friend Richard. 🙂 If you could just let us know what time you are arriving that would be WONDERFUL. It is fine if you are not sure we are just trying to plan our evenings. 😉 And we are so looking forward to your birthday dinner tonight love you and can’t wait to see you!!!!!
“Friend,” R says, gripping my wrist as he reads the message. He’s close enough that his tidy beard tickles my chin.
“We are friends,” I say. He pins me against the side of the car, kissing my neck. “You can’t do that here.”
“You don’t have to worry about that any more. You have me.”
My hands rest against his chest. “You’ll get us shot.”
“Just this weekend, I want you all to myself.” He slips his hands into my back pockets, squeezes my ass. “I mean, I drove us all the way here. I’m not asking you to pay for gas.”
“Coming here was your idea.”
“It’s a gift,” R says. “Maybe I want to get your dad’s blessing. Take you as my bride.”
“We’re not even going to share a bed, you know.”
“I’ll sneak up in the middle of the night,” R says, the tips of his fingers slipping into the waistband of my underwear.
“R, come on.”
“Fuck you on top of your stuffed animals.”
“My dad isn’t even going to let us close the door.”
He stops kissing me. “Just because I’m older?”
“Because he’s a prude. You’re only, like. Fifteen years older.”
“Hey, twelve years,” he says, removing his hand from my pants. “Eleven tomorrow. He should talk. Wasn’t your mom, like, not even eighteen when they met?” He steps away from me, grabs his stupid camo jacket from the car. “I mean, you were eighteen. This is why I want to meet them, so they can see I’m actually, you know. A good influence. I have my shit together.”
“I can’t believe you brought that jacket,” I say. I had grown up around guys in camo. They would return from the woods with bloody deer in their pick-up trucks, then show up to school with jerky they tore with their teeth. Now the queer twenty-somethings in Philly wear the same camo jackets and baseball caps. They’re all vegans.
“Don’t tell me you didn’t bring one.”
“I’m fine.”
“You’re wearing mine,” he insists, forcing the camo jacket over my shoulders.
“It’s way too big.”
“Your parents will blame me if you wake up tomorrow with a cold.” I let him guide my arms into the sleeves with his big hands. “Jesus, you look like a kid in that.”
“Gross.”
We cross the bridge into the town center. I haven’t been here in years. My dad used to bring me here to bike along the trail, hike through the woods. There are more people than I remember. Everyone visits Jim Thorpe now to see the changing leaves. Police officers direct vehicles at intersections as crowds cross the streets. Vendors sell pierogi, corn on the cob slathered in butter. My phone buzzes inside my pocket, again and again. The man in the woods is sending pictures of his dick.
*
R and I became friends after we hooked up in his apartment in West Philly. I was in my second semester at Temple, and he was just short of thirty, finishing his doctorate. His photo was the same one he had on Linkedin. Mine was a shirtless mirror selfie. We fucked quickly, quietly in his laundry-strewn apartment. His heavy hands never reached me, pressed into the mattress on either side of my face as if nervous he’d crush me with the slightest touch. He used a condom without asking. Afterwards I asked him about the posters of bands and movies on his walls. He couldn’t believe I hadn’t heard of almost anything that he liked. The only interest I could name at eighteen was Pokémon. He said that was stupid, then immediately apologized, blushing.
It’s not bad, it’s just not important, he stuttered. I made fun of his crooked Ikea bookshelves. He was surprised that I had read Dancer at the Dance. He laughed when I told him I flipped through Alan Hollinghurst for the sex scenes. He asked who the reader was in my family. I told him about the Canadian man I’d talked to through my teens, how he’d recommend books to me and jerk off over webcam as I told him what I thought. R stood up suddenly, still in his underwear. He arranged the pillows on his couch very carefully, offering me tea. Then he burst into nervous laughter, exclaiming: I thought I was already wearing pants! Before I left, he asked to see my student ID. I handed him my wallet, and caught him checking my driver’s license as well. He pushed me out the door with a stack of books. Now the real work begins, he said, as if he’d just been tutoring me. He said goodbye to me by name. I still hadn’t learned his.
A few days later, R invited me to grab drinks in a tiny unmarked bar. It was hidden above an Ethiopian restaurant. The tables were sticky, wobbled as we sat down. A bartender with greasy hair greeted him as Richard, and didn’t ask for our IDs. I noticed everyone downstairs had been black, almost everyone upstairs was white. I poked R in the ribs, told him there was no way I was calling him Richard.
But that’s my name, he laughed.
He asked where I was from. No one in Philly had heard of Weatherly, so I told R Jim Thorpe like I told everyone else. It wasn’t completely untrue; my dad had grown up there. He told me about his childhood in Philly, how he came out to his parents in middle school during a Sunday movie night screening of Y Tu Mamá También. He asked me when I told my family.
I never did officially. I came home with purple hickeys on my neck when I didn’t have a girlfriend. A BMW dropped me off in front of the house late at night. There are questions a person can ask— what girl your age leaves a mark like that?, who do you know that drives a BMW? — that signal that the asker doesn’t actually want to hear an answer. Not long after my seventeenth birthday, my dad announced during an otherwise uneventful dinner that no one has their sexuality worked out until their twenties. When a neighbor called my parents, accusing me of seducing her son while he was home from college, my mom forced my dad to confront me. Of course I can’t control what I do or do not know, he repeated, almost philosophical in his self-defense. You understand that? His point seemed to be that it was my fault I was closeted.
I could tell R wanted to impress me. Every word he used was new: doro wot, saison, gentrification. He said that the bar was run by anarchists, which sounded evil, but the bartender with the greasy hair just seemed kind of sad. On the wall was a framed newspaper article of a building burning. It looked like one of the houses in our neighborhood. I asked R about it. He said it was the MOVE bombing. The police bombed a house down the street in the 80s. The fire destroyed like seventy homes. Lots of people died. Even kids.
The police have bombs?
Of course. They just don’t use them on us. They use them on black people.
I’d never heard someone speak so directly about the world before. It was thrilling. You and my dad would seriously not get along.
Please stop comparing me to your father.
He didn’t go to college. But he likes history. Just like you. And you’re both grown-ups.
You mean adults, R laughed. So are you, you know. In a few years you’ll realize we’re basically the same age.
When he went to the bathroom, I checked Grindr. There was someone 355 feet away who wanted to meet, but he didn’t look like anyone in the bar. When R sat down, I asked him how close he thought that was.
Probably on this block, he said. You’re not going to meet him, are you?
I shrugged.
And here I thought we were on a date.
Sorry.
Just how many guys have you met?
I got a tiny bit obsessed when I first moved to the city.
What’s obsessed? Like ten?
I shook my head.
More? Less?
More.
Fifty?
I sipped my beer. What about you?
You’re like the only guy I’ve met this year. He touched my knee under the table. A hundred?
I don’t know.
Jesus. His hand traveled up my thigh. You’re kind of a slut, aren’t you?
I was a little bit drunk, glowing with laughter. You can’t say that.
Go meet him.
Now?
Oh my god, you seriously would. He covered his face with his hands, peeked at the bartender. What the fuck am I doing?
I’ll do it. But you have to get me another beer.
Okay. Be quick. Come right back.
I stood up to leave.
And be safe.
When I returned to the bar, R was waiting in the bathroom. There was no lock. I blew him while he held the door shut with his foot.
*
The used bookstore is still there on the main street of Jim Thorpe. R ducks and squeezes himself into the shop. He bumps a table displaying local history, greets the owner behind the counter. The owner, an old man, is covering his mouth with a handkerchief. R thumbs the stringy spines of discounted hardcovers. The old man approaches R, coughing, as I move towards the back of the store. I take out my phone.
The man in the woods tells me we are going to meet before I leave today. He is certain of this. He makes it sound inevitable. He needs me, he says, needs to have me. I ask him if we’ve met before. He sends an upside down smiley face. Every time I tell him I need to see face first in order to continue this conversation, he says the same thing (i don’t send face) and then demands to see more of me. I’ve already sent him all of my nudes. He tells me to take a picture right now of my ass.
I’m in a bookstore, I type
The man replies so. Just that, so. I blink at my phone for a second, and then look over at R. He is talking to the bookstore owner about Jim Thorpe. The owner is speaking through his handkerchief.
Let me see it in ur jeans then, the man messages me. He sends the slobbering emoji.
Lol no, I say. I already know I will.
He sends the slobbering emoji four more times, then: Come on do it quick.
I look over at R at the counter. He is standing over the owner as the old man scribbles something on a piece of pink paper. I pretend to be staring at the shelf as I take the phone out of my pocket, hold it behind me, and try to quickly take a photo of my ass. The photo on my screen afterwards is just a blur of motion, a smudge of my hip.
The photo just comes out blurrylol, I type quickly. And then I send him the photo.
O wow u actually tried, he sends back. Hot. U took the photo too soon, he says, as if to clarify the blurriness. And then adds: or too late? haha
Yea, I reply. I wonder if the man in the woods is an idiot.
O i know where u are
I stare at my phone, not responding. Of course he knows where I am. This is the only bookstore in town. The bookstore clerk is bent over wheezing now, hands on knees.
Ur nearby, the man in the woods says. Super close. Followed by a series of eye emojis.
I wonder if he is a friend of my parents, someone from church. I try again to take a picture of my ass. This one is less blurry. I send it.
“I’m sorry,” the bookstore owner croaks through his coughing, “so sorry for all the noise.” R is standing near him, his hand floating with uncertainty just above the old man’s back. I mime a smacking motion with my hand. R considers my suggestion for a moment. Then instead he caresses the man’s back with concern.
The man in the woods says: wut would ur dad think??
*
When we exit the store, R wants to find Jim Thorpe’s grave.
“The owner told me where to find it,” R says. The old man had scribbled some instructions on a pink receipt, stapled to a packet of information about the dead athlete. The packet is just an email the owner printed from the bookstore’s computer. The first page is just a long list of CC-ed addresses, the last page entirely blank.
“I’ve probably seen it on a field trip or something.”
“You definitely have,” R says. “The grave is pretty close.” As I follow him, I check my messages with the man in the woods. He’s going out for a walk. He’ll look for me.
“No chance we can explore more tomorrow?” R asks.
“My shift starts at 11,” I say. “So we have to leave pretty early.”
“Just call off, it’s your birthday,” he insists. But he knows that I can’t afford that.
We reach Jim Thorpe’s grave. Two bronze statues are on either side. On the left, Jim Thorpe has his arm outstretched behind himself, winding up to throw a discus. In the other, he charges forward with a football. A circle of benches surrounds the grave. A family is eating lunch on one. “I’ve definitely been here before,” I tell him.
“Did you know he wasn’t even from here?” R asks, flipping through his packet.
“Of course he’s from here. They named the town after him.”
“This says he was from a reservation in Oklahoma. Sac and Fox Nation.”
“What’s that?”
“Jim Thorpe was Native American,” R laughs.
“No way.” But looking at the statues, it’s pretty obvious that the athlete wasn’t white.
He opens his mouth dramatically wide, miming my disbelief. “I’m surprised you even got into Temple.”
“In the movie he’s played by Burt Lancaster.”
“That’s fucked. There’s a movie?”
“It’s old. My dad and I used to watch it.”
“We should stream it tonight,” he says, continuing to read. “Yeah, so the town just bought the body. For tourism. Because no one was mining coal here anymore.”
“I feel like an idiot.”
R uses the baggy arms of his jacket to pull me close. “This is why you have me.” He kisses my forehead.
I squirm away from him. “I told you you can’t do that here.”
“You really should just not show up tomorrow.”
“Please, R.”
“I don’t know why you don’t just move in with me. I already basically pay your rent.”
“Not all of it.”
“You could focus on school. I told you that you could have the guest room.”
I approach the statue of Jim Thorpe with a football. “I do actually remember coming here,” I say. I was little, not even ten yet. I thought that it looked like my dad was checking out the statue’s butt. I thought this was funny, I whispered the thought to my mom with a giggle. She didn’t respond.
“Just think about it, Obi,” R says.
It wasn’t that my mom acted like I had said anything wrong. It was as if I hadn’t spoken at all, the words possessing a kind of invisibility. And in speaking them, I became invisible myself.
*
My father and I used to ride our bikes through Jim Thorpe. Following the railroad tracks beneath a steel bridge, passing fishermen, knee-deep in the river. The woods on all sides. I was thirteen or so, scratching at scabs on my arms. I didn’t know Jim Thorpe was a real person yet. It just sounded like the name of a man who worked with his hands. The kind of man who stepped through the front door of a home to the dinner table and sighed, wiping the black grease from his brow with the fraying sleeve of his dull flannel shirt. The kind of man that maybe some boys dream of being, but that I just wanted to fuck. Jim Thorpe was a name not yet belonging to anybody. It was a place, existing between the trees with the dying leaves, between the steel bridge and the train tracks and the fisherman in the river.
My father would always tell me that there was no better place in the world to see autumn than here. This town where he grew up. Not far from the mines his grandfather worked in, and his father before him. Even though I don’t think my father has ever left Pennsylvania, I still believe him.
He looked up at hillside cliffs above us, the trees engulfing the jutting stone in their flames. He said: September would have been too soon, November too late. Has to be October. And I nodded silently as we followed the railroad and the river. Yes, I understood. And then he said: It is beautiful. Isn’t it. He said this as if I had already told him so, and that he agreed with me.
I always wanted to try it out, to pretend I am the kind of person who says such things. But it doesn’t sound right. Honestly I’m not even convinced that I had known it was beautiful until my father told me.
*
We find an Irish bar down the hill from the grave to pass the last hour before we meet my parents. R orders a beer. I get a soda. He keeps fiddling with a hook and ring game on the hightop. My phone buzzes in my pocket. The man in the woods is getting impatient. He’s been looking for me. He says that he’s going to the woods. He’ll be waiting for me there.
“Can you put your phone down for one second?”
“Sorry,” I say.
“Someday I really think you’re really going to appreciate everything I’m doing here. Meeting your parents, seeing where you grew up. I want to know you.”
“I grew up in Weatherly.”
R flicks the ring. He’s figured out the game, hooking it every time. “What?”
“It’s like twenty minutes from here. Weatherly. It’s super close.”
“But you always talk about Jim Thorpe.”
“‘Cause there’s nothing in Weatherly.”
“It’s where you’re from,” R says, reaching across the table for my hand.
“This place is a lot more interesting.”
He squeezes. It’s strange to see our hands together on the table, like it’s someone else’s hand that R is holding. “Hey,” R says.
“What?” I say, avoiding his eye.
“No one is staring, Obi.”
“Okay.”
“Your face is bright red.”
“I just don’t like PDA.” I say, pulling my hand back from him.
R grins. “You don’t make any sense.”
“What?”
“It’s just that, I don’t know. How we met. What we did in the bathroom on our first date.” He finishes his beer. “Speaking of. I have to piss.”
“That wasn’t public.”
He laughs. “You’re crazy.”
“I could come back in a few minutes,” I say. I wonder if I could just fuck R in the bathroom and get this out of my system. “You know, join you.”
“You think people are going to stare at us holding hands, but not the two of us hooking up in the bathroom?”
“No,” I say. “No one would think that’s what we’re doing.”
“Sometimes,” he says, swinging the ring one last time at the hook. It misses. “The way you think, it’s really depressing.” He stands up. “Weatherly, right?”
I nod.
“I’m going to Google it,” he says before leaving for the bathroom. “And then I want to go see there. I want to see where you’re from. Okay?”
“Okay.”
I chew on ice until he is in the bathroom. The man in the woods has dropped a pin where to meet him. It almost seems too easy. I thought I might have to tell R. I grab R’s jacket and head towards the front door. The server approaches me on the way out. I worry that she’s going to ask me to put a card down, but she just calls out that she’s going to leave the bill with my dad. I head downhill through town. I slip through the line in front of the pierogi stand, pass the train station. The walking trail is paved and runs parallel to the woods. I follow it until I near the pin that the man dropped. The trail is crowded: families on bicycles, couples strolling. There must be a face painting station in town: I see a child with whiskers, another white like a skeleton.
C u, the man says. He’s somewhere uphill past the tree line.
I scan the woods. There’s no one there.
come here, he says.
No one looks twice when I step off the trail and enter the woods.
*
The man in the woods is handsome and stupid. He has the build of a retired athlete, with strong arms and the very beginnings of a belly emerging beneath his Aeropostale hoodie. When he runs his fingers through his restless dark hair, it holds whatever shape his fingers give it. Whenever he grins his big grin, it disappears from his face almost immediately, as if he’s already forgotten whatever he was smiling about in the first place. His neck and cheeks are pink with razor burn. He has five or six bracelets on his wrist. One has a small tooth on it, like that of a shark.
“Do you surf?” I ask him.
He grins, stops grinning. “Where would I surf?”
We continue uphill, stumbling over rocks, scrambling around trees. At one point I slip, my foot nearly popping out of my shoe. He asks if I’m okay. His hand falls heavy on my shoulder, then drifts down my back. He touches my ass just for a moment, as if confirming it’s real.
“You do this a lot?” he asks me.
“Now and then,” I tell him. “What about you?”
“Usually I end up seeing the same guy over and over for a while. For a few years.” He steps up on a boulder, and turns around to help me up. He takes my hand, pulls me up. “It’s not easy around here. Even with the apps. It used to be easier when I was, well. When I was young like you.” We stop for a break before continuing uphill. He hasn’t released my hand yet. “But I’ll settle for this.” He laughs. “You know? I miss this. You’re from this area, aren’t you?”
I tell him I am.
“I knew it.” He lets go of my hand, slaps his hands together as if to rid them of dust. “Danny’s kid?”
“Danny?”
“Heston.”
“Oh, yeah,” I laugh. “No one calls him Danny.”
“I remember he gave you a weird name. Biblical.”
“Obadiah.”
“I told him. You doom a kid naming him something like that. In school, I mean.”
“Yeah, but no one calls me that any more. Only substitute teachers.”
He gives me a funny look at this.
“When I was still in high school. I’m twenty.”
We arrive in the ruins of something. Collapsing stone walls. Rusted door frames. Tall chimneys that vomit debris from their hearths. The inside is littered with leaves just as the outside. Beer bottles here and there. Smashed glass, black wood from a small fire.
“Are you friends with my dad?” I ask him.
“Used to be,” he says. “Is that okay?”
I shrug. “He would freak. I just don’t recognize you.”
“We met once. You and I. You were just a kid. I thought if I told you, you might get scared off.”
I shake my head no. I didn’t think of my dad as having friends.
“You really look just like him.”
“I’m not like him at all.”
The man laughed at this. “I believe you. It’s just funny. You saying that. Being here.”
I look around. “Here?”
“He brought me here,” the man says. “A long time ago.” He tosses his backpack down next to the fire pit. “I’m not surprised you don’t remember. It was a long time ago. Things went to shit between me and Danny. Pardon my language. I moved to Harrisburg for a long time after that.” His pants are already undone. He’s trying to get himself hard, a small bottle of lube in his left hand. “We should be quick,” he says.
I close the distance between us. “Do you need help?”
“I got it. Just to wake up a little bit.” He looks me over. “Twenty, huh? I remember twenty.”
“Twenty-one tomorrow,” I say. The man doesn’t have any pubes. The pink splotches are there, too, around his penis. The bare trees creak. The leaves inside of the building roll over each other until they hit the walls of the collapsed buildings. They keep rolling there in place against the stone walls. I recognize the pink splotches on the man’s neck and face. At the first hints of a beard years ago, I began shaving every day. I would drag the blade against the grain to make the skin as smooth as possible. I have always wanted to be beautiful.
I kiss him, trying to calm him down. The man’s whole body is shaking. I can tell he uses spray deodorant. He smells like a high school locker room. His tongue is fat and still in my mouth.
“You don’t like kissing?” I ask. His dick is flaccid in my hand.
“It’s cold,” he says. “And I’m a little nervous. I never thought–”
“It’s okay,” I tell him, rubbing his arms.
“You really look just like him.”
“You’re okay,” I say. I wonder if he was in love with my father.
“Maybe if you blow me a little,” he whispers, leaning back against the crumbling wall of the building. “Please.” I take off R’s jacket and kneel on it, unbuttoning my pants to jerk myself off. He stares down at me as I take him into my mouth. “Doesn’t look like you need any help, at least.”
“Is that okay?” I ask. But it’s obvious that what I am doing is working. I take his hand and put it on the back of my hand. When I take all of him into my mouth, he holds me in place.
“Good,” he says.
When I bend over one of the stone walls, he begins rummaging around in his backpack behind me. I find myself facing a thin tree on the other side of the wall. Carved into the bark is a stick figure of a man.
“I think I’ve been here before,” I say.
The man begins prepping me with his fingers.
“ I think I carved this stick man. I think my dad brought me here.”
I hear the man tear open a condom behind me.
“Do you get tested?”
“Not in a few years,” he says. “But honestly I haven’t been with anyone since.”
“Then you don’t need to use one.”
The man considers this for a moment. “Are you sure?”
“If you want to, that’s fine. But I’m on PrEP. And I get tested every few weeks.”
He kisses the back of my neck. “Then I’m going to enjoy myself.” At first I support myself with my hands on the stone wall, but the man pushes me down onto my elbows. The tree carving of the man is unavoidable at this angle. I carved it, I’m sure. This low wall, the one I am bending over now, I sat on this wall as my father walked off into the woods. He had left me with his knife. He said that he would be right back, that he was just going for a piss. Only it took longer than a piss. Long enough for me to carve this stick figure into the tree. When he whispered, out there in the trees, someone else whispered back. I had wondered at the time if it was a ghost.
I keep jerking myself, but I am suddenly aware of the way the stone scratches my elbows as the man heaves into me, the cold that concentrates where the lube runs down the inside of my thighs in greasy streaks. I finish before the man does, but just barely, and that’s enough to push the man over. He pulls me close to him, drooling down my back as he finishes with happy little grunts. He peels himself off of me like a sunburn. A chill collects in the remaining sweat.
“I was here,” I say. “When you met my dad.”
He pulls a pack of tissues out of his bag to clean us up. I see a bunch of condoms fall to our feet. “So you do remember,” he says, wiping me first.
“You were—”
“Really, we were here all the time. You were just here once. Near the end. Your mom was visiting family for the weekend or something. You were so small.”
“I must have been at least ten,” I say, turning around to face him. I pull my briefs up. He is wiping himself now.
“Younger. I remember he picked you up and put you on the wall there.”
That wasn’t like my dad at all. He never even hugged me goodbye.
“He just left you there. I felt kind of bad. Though of course I wanted your dad all to myself. He ended things after that anyway. Broke my heart.” The man is tracing his fingers across my face. “Always felt like you being here might have had something to do with that.”
“I didn’t know,” I say.
“Know what?”
“That he was– I don’t know. Into guys.”
“You sure about that?”
“I swear.” Did I know? The knowledge felt like a joke that I’d always told myself without ever considering that it might also be true.
“He brought me here the first time when I was about your age. I wasn’t supposed to come around Weatherly at all. He told me he’d kick my ass if I came anywhere near his house. Your house. And I lived with my mom until I left for the city.”
“Why did you message me?”
“Come on. You’re a beautiful boy.”
“But once you knew who I was.”
The man tucks his shirt in, buttons his pants. “I see Danny sometimes. At the Sunoco near 76. The ALDI in Lehighton. He looks me in the eye, excuses himself when he passes me. I can tell he thinks that I’m just another man buying groceries for my family. I could knock the guy’s teeth out and he would still think I was just some random psycho on the street.” He pulls up his fly. “At least when I was still in Harrisburg, I could believe he still thought of me once in a while.”
“He probably just doesn’t recognize you.”
“I hate him,” the man says. “With my whole fucking heart. Sorry. Look, of course I wanted you. But–” he says, zipping his jacket. “And I say this knowing that it won’t happen. It was just a passing fantasy. There’s no reason your father will ever know we met today. But I will tell you, when you walked up to me. Before you even spoke. I was sure it was you. It was almost supernatural. Something out of a movie. I don’t know if it was the way you walked, or if I could smell it. Something animal. But I knew it. And suddenly I was imagining next Sunday. Your mom and dad go to Our Lady of Lordes. And they always go to the Dunkin around the corner afterwards. I could walk up to him and say” — he giggles, his face pink– “I fucked your only son.”
I am suddenly aware that my pants are still unbuttoned, revealing the childish yellow of my underwear. I feel the uncomfortable fullness the man has left inside of me. I button my pants and check my pocket for my phone. I wonder where R is.
“Pardon me,” the man says, lifting his backpack onto shoulders. “I’m not serious. You got me talking. I really just thought I’d come here, do my business and leave.” He squeezes my arm. “Why don’t you put your jacket on, kid? You must be freezing.”
R’s jacket is still there on the ground. “I’m okay.”
I watch the man descend back down to the trail. It’s only when he exits the trees that I think to ask him why my father brought us here. I can remember my father saying the name of this place again and again while we were here. But it was like it was another language. The trees creak in the breeze. I try to say the words myself. But I cannot move my lips so that they make the right sounds.
*
I find R in the backseat of his car and join him there. The car is warm. He’s been running the heat. He is barefoot, picking at the skin on the underside of his left foot. His foot is bleeding. “I don’t want to hear anything about him.”
“I’m sorry,” I say.
“I feel sick enough as it is. Wondering where you went. I ate both of our Cliff bars while you were gone.”
“I should have told you.”
“And I’m supposed to eat dinner after this.” He pulls on his sock. Red dots form on the cotton. “Are you okay?”
“Of course.”
“You seem, I don’t know. Quiet.”
“I’m fine.”
“Tell me you were at least safe this time.”
I could lie to him. I could tell him that the man wore a condom. “I thought you didn’t want to know anything about him.”
R exits the car, slamming the door behind him. For a moment, he just stands there, and I wonder if he’s going to walk back into town. Then he gets into the driver’s seat. He looks at me in the backseat. “Where’s my jacket?”
I hadn’t realized until that moment that I’d left it on the ground in the woods. “I don’t know.”
“Is it in some guy’s house?”
“No,” I say. “The woods. I can go get it”
“Forget it,” he says, starting the car. “We’re already so late to dinner.” He releases the parking brake, shifts the car into reverse. Then he twists around in his seat to stare at me at once more. We just stare at each other for a few moments. “Seatbelt,” he says finally.
*
“So you’re the friend, huh?” my dad says when we enter, holding a beer. “We thought you two might never get here.” He disappears into the kitchen and exits on the other side in the living room. A cop show throws shadows here and there across the hallway wall. Toto plays in the kitchen. “Where’s the phone, Kate? I’m going to call the restaurant to tell them we’re coming.”
“Noisy,” R mouths to me.
My mom hands the phone to my dad before he ascends the stairs. “They know we’re coming,” she says, returning to the kitchen.
“But they expected us at 7,” my dad shouts from the landing. “It’s already 7:30.”
“We were just watching tv,” my mom says, reappearing from the kitchen with a plate of mozzarella sticks. “You two must be starving,” she says. R looks disturbed by even the sight of the mozzarella sticks, and I can’t eat anything until the man is out of me. “Didn’t you bring a jacket, honey?”
“I’m fine, mom,” I say, excusing myself for the bathroom under the stairs. There’s an Uncle John’s bathroom reader on the back of the toilet, a candle with a black cat and pumpkin burning on the sink. It smells like candy apples. The bathroom is smaller than I remember, the wall only inches from my knees as I sit on the toilet. I wonder if R could even fit in here.
“He’s always been like this,” I hear my mom say to R in the hallway. She’s leading R on a tour of the house. “We could never get him to dress for the weather.”
“It’s like he doesn’t feel a thing,” R says, just outside the bathroom door.
“Well,” my mom says. “You must be very special to him. He never introduces us to anyone.” I wait until I hear them reach the top of the stairs before I push every bit of the man out of me.
I find R on my bed upstairs, holding my stuffed Pikachu. “Your parents are psychotic.”
“Oh no,” I say. “What did my mom do?”
“You didn’t notice? They had the radio and the tv blaring.”
“So?”
“At the same time.”
I show him the desk where I finished homework. He traces his finger over where I carved my name into the wood. I show him my collection of cross country trophies.
“I didn’t know you did cross country,” R says.
I join him on the bed. I take my stuffed Pikachu from his hands and wiggle it in his face.
“I’m going home,” R says.
I grab an elementary school photo from the dresser. “This is me,” I say. When he doesn’t answer, I show him another from middle school.
“I already asked your dad if he could give you a ride in the morning,” R says.
“What do you mean?” I ask.
But then he stands up, taps his pocket for his car keys. “I don’t know what I’m doing here with you.”
“What about dinner?” I grab his arm when he gets up from the bed, but he continues to the door. I follow him to the top of the stairwell. “You’re embarrassing me,” I say. I try to whisper, but it comes out a hiss.
“You’ll be okay,” he says. He doesn’t lower his voice at all. “You’re an adult.”
I follow him down the steps. My parents are in the kitchen, pretending not to eavesdrop. They’ve turned both the television and the radio off. “Please,” I say. “I want to go home.”
R takes my face into his big hands and kisses me. My parents have never seen me with a man before, but I don’t try to stop R. Only I can hear him: “This is your home.”
*
Rocco’s is more bar than restaurant. Loud, poorly lit with table candles. Other patrons pass by as shadows, their faces indistinguishable. My father is across from me, my mother between us on the long end of the table. We sit in silence until the waiter, a teenager, comes by. Everyone asks for a beer except for me. I ask for a soda.
“Get him a beer,” my dad says with a big smile, telling the waiter I turn twenty-one in a few hours. “Birthday boy.”
“Our little man,” my mother says. When the pizza arrives, she insists I take the first slice. “After the way your stomach was acting up earlier.”
“What’s wrong with his stomach?” my dad asks. I study him to see if his eyes follow the waiter.
“I couldn’t believe Richard just left like that,” my mom says.
“Was he sick?” my dad asks, stuck on the upset stomach.
“He’s a little old for you anyway.”
“We just had a little fight,” I explain. “He didn’t like the town. He thought it was sad.”
“Sad?” my father says.
“I don’t think it’s sad,” my mom says.
“Just like the whole history of this place,” I say.
My dad looks at my mother. “What’s he talking about?”
“Just what they did with Jim Thorpe,” I say. “Taking his body and all.”
“Christ, this again,” my father says.
“People are very upset about this, Daniel,” my mother says.
“They paid for it, you know,” my dad says. “The body.”
“His wife’s the one who sold it,” my mom adds. “I’m just saying, you have to consider both sides. They made sure to bury him with a bit of his own land. I think that’s nice. If you ask me.”
“Anyway,” my dad says. “Shame about your friend. Fighting with you on your birthday.”
“I think he could have at least stayed the night. Driven you back. I made up the bed downstairs for him and all.”
“I’ll have you back in time in the morning,” my dad says. “We’ll leave early.”
When we finish eating, my dad and I wait outside the restaurant while my mom uses the restroom. It’s even colder now that the sun’s gone down, but I’ve borrowed my father’s old jacket at his insistence. There’s a hole in one of the sleeves. When I move my arms, puffs of down escape and float away into the dark.
“I went back to those old mining ruins today,” I tell him.
My dad coughs. “Okay.”
“You know where I mean,” I say. “Up in the woods. I think I was like ten when we went together.”
“You were very young when we went there,” my dad says. “I didn’t expect you to remember.”
“You left me alone.”
“I wasn’t far.”
“Does mom know?”
“I haven’t been back in a very long time.” He sighs. ”You really shouldn’t remember.”
“I didn’t. Until today.”
“You brought Richard there?”
“No,” I say. “I went alone.”
“How did you find it?”
“I met someone else,” I say. “And he brought me there.”
We look at each other, eye to eye, understanding. Then my mom is there, still zipping her jacket as she exits the restaurant. “Chilly, chilly, chilly night,” she says.
The car ride is silent until my dad begins grumbling a series of sounds I don’t recognize. I listen from the backseat. He mutters “no” to himself, mumbles another series of sounds, only slightly different.
My mother looks back at me from the passenger seat. “That’s your great-grandfather’s tongue. I haven’t heard it in years. I never understood a word of it. There were so many conversations your father and I would overhear happening at his parent’s house. When we first started dating. At Thanksgiving, at Christmas. Everyone would be sitting there, talking to each other. Right beside us. In the same room. And we wouldn’t understand a word they were saying.” She laughs. “It was lonely. Honestly. Being on the outside of something like that.”
I ask what it means.
“It’s a name,” he says.
“Of an ex-girlfriend?” my mother jokes.
“A place,” he says.
“It sounds like you’re cursing us.”
*
The next morning, my dad and I leave early to hike to the ruins. He’ll drive me back to the city once we are finished here. R’s jacket is there in the leaves with the condoms that fell from the man’s backpack.
“Is this supposed to be me?” my dad asks, referring to the carving in the tree.
I tell him I don’t remember. I try to mimic the sounds he’d been making in the car the night before. But it comes out all wrong.
“I’m surprised it’s still there.”
“The ruins?” I say.
“The language. Everyone figured it would die with me.” He touches the spot on the wall where he’d left me. “I was okay with that. I thought I had already forgotten it.”
“Why did you bring me here?”
“I told you.” He picks up R’s jacket. “I didn’t believe you would remember.”
“But you still brought me.”
“I guess because this is where we come from.”
I try to say the name of this place again.
“Stop,” my father says.
“I want to learn,” I say.
“I don’t know what it means.” He shakes R’s jacket free of leaves before handing it to me. “I wouldn’t even know how to write it down on paper. I just know how to repeat the sounds.”
“That’s enough,” I say. I zip the jacket. “Just teach me this.”
“Listen. Once more. Move your lips like mine.”
